Monday, 1 December 2014

Who cashes in on Big Data?

So the recent
baring of Kim Kardashian’s bottom didn’t break the internet. But the fact that
it was billed as a plausible attempt to do so was an extraordinary comment on
the times we live in.

The obsessions with
peepshow nudity, vacuous celebrities and the net brought together in a weird
nexus.

The internet is now
so all-pervasive that people of school or college age can barely conceive of a
world without it. Yet it is only 16 years since I was in the team that
delivered the Ipswich Star’s first website. And we were ahead of the trend, not
behind it.

There was no sound,
no video or moving graphics. We had to keep images small, just one per page, to
avoid overstretching people’s patience while they downloaded. In this age of
streaming movies and real-time high-definition news and sport, that seems like
ancient history.

Developers of the
early computers would have been amazed (maybe) at the computing capacity most
of us now carry around in our pockets. Gadgets so cheap most schoolkids take
them everywhere provide ready, rapid access to most of the world’s stored
information – and we use them to share videos of cute kittens and photos of Kim
K’s curvy bits.

“Wearable
technology” puts its users in a world fore-imagined in the Terminator movies.
Internet-gathered information superimposed on ones view of the real world
around you.

A dream to some,
this sounds to me like a nightmare. But then I was a late convert to the CD and
the VHS video. Maybe I’ll come round to internet-enabled specs.

All this new
capability is empowering, exciting and just a little scary all at the same
time. And we’re still, in historical terms, only in the early days of the
internet. Expect the changes ahead to be bigger and quicker than those already
behind us.

Next up, what’s
been dubbed “the Internet of Things”.

Already you can use
your mobile phone to set your satellite TV box to record programmes. With the
right kit you can get an app to operate your home central heating from anywhere
in the world. It’s apparently possible to buy internet-connected
washing-machines, fridges, slow-cookers and vacuum-cleaners, and light-bulbs
that switch themselves on when you and your phone get near home.

All this is based
on Big Data, and inevitably it means Big Bucks for some very Big Companies.

The boss of one of
those companies, Cisco Systems, has calculated that “the Internet of
Everything” will be worth £9trillion by 2022.

That’s about £1,275
per person on the planet. Or, to put it another way, about five times the total
size of the UK economy. All heading for the coffers of a handful of mostly
American firms. Cripes.

The writer and
“social theorist” Jeremy Rifkin, getting all excited, reckons this amounts to a
Third Industrial Revolution. He predicts that the inter-connectedness of people
and machines will make everything so efficient it will reduce the cost of
producing things to “near zero”, thereby overthrowing capitalism and making us
all happy ever after. Calm down, Jeremy.

If manufacturing is
so efficient it no longer needs to employ workers and all the money goes to the
firm, who’s going to buy all the wonderful stuff produced?

And apart from
creating all this lovely warm customer satisfaction, what is all this Big Data
actually for?

Cisco Systems is
working on a piece of kit called “the Connected Athlete” that “turns the
athlete’s body into a distributed system of sensors and network intelligence.
The athlete becomes more than just a competitor – he or she becomes a Wireless
Body Area Network, or WBAN .”

Very clever, very
futuristic. And worth a second thought.

Google, your phone
provider – and potentially anyone they want to sell or give the information to,
such as the government – already knows at any given moment where you are. Or,
at least, where your phone is.

Cars that record
where you are, how fast you’re travelling and how many passengers you have are
equipped already with the equivalent of an aircraft’s “black box”. How long
before the police demand access to such information?

A public already
inured to the prevalence of CCTV probably won’t object. Most don’t seem to mind
living in the most intense surveillance state the world has ever seen.

Cases such as the
phone-hacking scandal, paranoia about people taking photos of other people’s
children (as if they didn’t show their own images constantly on Snapchat and
Facebook anyway) and constant bleats by royals and other celebs would suggest
we still believe in privacy. That it’s something we feel we have a right to,
and don’t want “invaded”.

Too late, guys.
Google, Facebook, MI5 and the CIA have already brought the Age of Privacy to an
end. The Internet of Everything merely erects its tombstone.

Next: what
happens when all this Big Data falls into the hands of hackers?